Chevron powers its business future with SAP on Azure and the Microsoft Cloud

The destination is business value

As a global energy company, Chevron understands the need to set strategies and plans while remaining adaptable. Recognizing the value in increasing its business agility, extending software life cycles, and reducing costs through improved integrations, Chevron—which has over 20 years of experience managing SAP environment on-premises—decided to embark on two key transformational initiatives: a greenfield implementation of S/4HANA and an enterprise resource planning (ERP) migration from on-premises to SAP on HANA.

This migration and multi-year, greenfield implementation are key steps in Chevron’s ongoing digital evolution, which aims to bring greater automation, analytics, data insights, and AI to the business. “Our primary goal is to support the business with improved reliability,” says Paul Brody, Digital Core Technical Platform Product Manager at Chevron. “Between cyberthreats, divestitures, and acquisitions, SAP on Azure and the Microsoft Cloud gives us the reliability, agility, and scalability to stay responsive to business needs.”

Getting there with Azure and the Microsoft Cloud

To help systems and processes remain up and running, Chevron began migrating from on-premises Oracle to SAP HANA on Azure to ensure continued operations throughout the larger SAP S/4HANA implementation. The strategy was to streamline and extend the life cycle of current state systems to ensure there was enough continued capacity to support the business environment for the rest of the SAP S/4HANA implementation timeline.

This migration, however, wasn’t simply forward-looking—it was an example of the new, innovative capabilities that Chevron developed with its partners, says Aravinth Nallusamy, SAP ECC Migrations Product Manager at Chevron. “While migrating to SAP on Azure and the Microsoft Cloud, we shrank the migration time for a 12-terabyte system from 72 to 48 hours, which included all the code revisions and a conversion from RDBMS to SAP HANA.”

A powerful collaboration

Chevron’s digital innovation initiatives are tapping SAP on Azure and the Microsoft Cloud to enhance agility, flexibility, and scalability. Azure automation, deployment, and recovery capabilities are helping Chevron to do more, faster and simpler. Increased flexibility has improved Chevron’s ability to create new application deployments and broadened its capacity to better monitor and manage its systems.

Chevron’s business applications are benefitting from full-stack automation with Azure DevOps, which is drastically reducing development times and enabling continuous improvement. The company uses Azure NetApp Files for its primary database storage to get the operational benefits of network attached storage, like snapshot cloning. With Azure Monitor, Chevron can vet application performance and availability, quickly identify and troubleshoot emerging issues, and enhance user experiences.

Additionally, Chevron uses Azure reliability tools such as Azure Site Recovery and Azure Backup Recovery Services vault to shore up application resilience and protect against unplanned IT outages. The company also delivers a frictionless employee experience with single sign-on with SAP Fiori enabled with Azure Active Directory.

The foundation of this enterprise-level collaboration between Chevron and Microsoft is trust, openness, and a comprehensive understanding of the energy industry that sparks innovation and addresses business needs. “Chevron partnered with Microsoft to simplify operations and enhance protections for our SAP system,” says Chevron’s Johnson Kon, Product Owner, SAP Performance Management. “Microsoft experts helped us accelerate our SAP Disaster Recovery deployment using Azure products and services, and we were able to complete the Disaster Recovery setup quickly and reduce our Recovery Time Objective from days to hours.”

The future is here

These new capabilities represent real and substantial digital changes for Chevron. Historically, standing up a new instance required opening tickets with the operating systems team to provision virtual machines, calling a data hosting team, and then assembling multiple technology components and people that required integration. All of this had dependency chains, wait times, approvals, resource requests, and secondary tickets—in addition to the general churn faced by most companies that manage systems on-premises.

Now, one group can perform these activities, with far less effort, while maintaining mandatory corporate controls. “With SAP on Azure, we do everything ourselves, including provisioning, storage, and database and application installation and configuration,” says Kevin Collins, Cloud Engineer at Chevron. “And something that might have taken three to four weeks to complete can now be done in three to four hours.”

The scalability of SAP on Azure further supports this agility and responsiveness to business needs. Nallusamy notes how this newfound agility is enabling fast and responsive scalability: “With SAP on Azure, we can easily scale up and down depending on our business needs, which is allowing us to provide real business value for any critical process.”

The capacity to respond quickly to emerging business requirements is giving Chevron the power to pivot with the industry. “We acquired an energy company during the migration, and because of our deployment of SAP on Azure, we were able to respond to the acquisition integration and meet business demands more quickly, easily, and at a lower cost,” says Leroy Purvis, ERP Cloud Migrations Product Manager, Chevron.

Integration, intelligence, and innovation

In addition to the increased scalability, reliability, and cost reductions, Chevron is creating even more opportunities for business intelligence, collaboration, and innovation with SAP on Azure and the Microsoft Cloud.

The company has identified opportunities to integrate valuable SAP-based transaction data into a data lake, and Azure infrastructure is playing a key role in managing and accessing this data so that Chevron can begin running analytics. Chevron also plans to use other valuable Azure capabilities in the Microsoft Cloud, including machine learning, AI, ERP, and operations functions. “SAP on Azure presents tremendous opportunities for us in terms of powerful business-facing, data-backed capabilities,” says Ramesh Vadlamani, Enterprise System Enablement Platform Services Manager at Chevron.

Chevron has positioned itself to not only adapt to an ever-changing industry and shifting markets, but to lead in the energy future. The aggregation of SAP and Azure assessment data, field, and core business data, combined with powerful new Azure tools and services opens the door for real collaboration and innovation throughout the Microsoft ecosystem. Chevron teams use Power BI to access, visualize, and gain insights from data, and they use local, no-code solutions to improve processes, generate and integrate new insights, increase flexibility, and save costs.

“Core SAP on Azure services like automation really enhance our capabilities and give us the capacity to be flexible and scalable, but also reliable,” Vadlamani states.

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